By Devdutt Nawalkar
Directed by John Albo
Starring Trevor Goddard, Rudy Davis, Sally Kirkland
Some salient scenes from Flexing With Monty, now burned into my shrivelled mind:
(1) A buff, exercise-freak called Monty fucking a blow-up doll. Later on, he does an encore with a life-size, stuffed polar bear.
(2) Said exercise freak feeling impulse to clench his supposed brother Bertin’s naked buttocks while the latter’s asleep.
(3) Monty remembering getting a massage in the nude from his grandmother.
(4) Bertin always carrying a red scarf tucked between his legs, staring at a candle in the dark, getting hard and imagining the scarf turn to flesh.
(5) Bertin dreaming that he’s growing pregnant with his mother before having the foetus disgorged off by his shrewish grandmother.
(6) Bertin bringing back an exotic animal from the pet store to keep in his room, it being a bald, masturbating midget.
(7) Some nun conjuring images of a post-nuclear holocaust world where man’s been knocked back to primeval slime, and women are laying eggs in marshes. “DO YOU KNOW HOW IT FEELS TO LAY EGGS IN A MARSH??”
(8) Monty lowering his tights to fart in the nun’s face.
(9) Nun also disclosing to Bertin that he was conceived on the haunches of a horse.
(10) Bertin eventually kissing his mother on the mouth.
Did I just see that? Flexing With Monty has got to be one of the most absurd, laugh-out-loud mindfucks I’ve ever seen. Directed by John Albo, the movie has been in the works for fourteen years, and has now earned the dubious honour of being the most delayed film in history. Starring the late Trevor Goddard (the first Mortal Kombat movie, the guy who gets beat up by Sonya in her first match…Kano, there you go) in the eponymous role, this amateurly-acted, and outrageously lewd and deranged movie will push all kinds of buttons and make you come out with rare insight into how fucked you are in the head to have had put yourself through it.
Monty is a Phy. Ed. teacher at a school, and a gym freak for the other twenty four hours of the day. He lives with his younger brother Bertin (Rudy Davis) inside what looks like a deserted hangar. Monty is built like a mother but is slightly simple-minded, dreams of becoming the head of athletics at his school, abstains from substance abuse, and is a raving homophobe and anti-feminist. His brother Bertin is his polar opposite; slim, into philosophy and other intellectual pursuits to the extent that it leads Monty to conjecture that all the stuff inside Bertin’s head results in the perpetually constipated look he carries. Bertin’s been looked after by Monty since the age of five, prior to which he was in an orphanage, presumably because Monty was too young to care for the baby. The brothers are generally fond of each other. You can take that as you may. The film runs through their lalaland existence, ultimately trying to unravel their dead parents’ identity which Monty has withheld from his brother all along.
Trevor Goddard died a few days after filming the final shot. What a way to go! He plays up his caricature to the T, strutting and posing like Atlas-incarnate, showing superb comic timing, probably unintentional at that. I mean..”You look like the mummied remains of an anorexic school girl”? “You damned faggets eat fried ratcunt and dessicated penises the morning after ya’ll bugger each other, don’t ya?” And that’s nothing, there’s tons more obnoxious stuff practically littered through the movie. The guy playing his brother is horrible, but ludicrously funny with his pearls of ontological wisdom. The nun is played by one-time softcore starlet Sally Kirkland, a character central to the film’s resolution as it is (hah!).
Monty dies at the end. His last words are, “Are my muscles sagging?”
All but one, Monty. All but one.
Mehta Kya Kehta? 